A formulation for optimizing the young’s modulus of a structure

Abstract

Young’s modulus optimization can be used as an intermediate step for topology problems. This can be achieved by eliminating the parts of a structure where the Young’s modulus tends to be zero. This paper is concerned with the case of the compliance method coupled with the finite element method.We present a formulation to turn this problem in a standard form of mathematical programming - in our case it is the second-order cone programming. The advantage here is that on the one hand all that theengineer has to do is to compute elemental data, and on the other, large discretized structures can be optimized due to the efficiency of the proposed formulation by the use of standard solvers